A Child from Haiti

The anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti will probably find me gnawing again on the central moral dilemma of our adoption of a Haitian child, which is to some extent the dilemma in almost every international adoption: that terrible misfortune for some can bring extraordinary joy to others. I think about this all the time: when waking Rose up in the morning (she sleeps like a champ), or holding her hand on the street, or watching her open her Christmas presents, with her adoring extended family all around: without the earthquake, she wouldn’t be here. It’s not living on borrowed time (at least I hope not), and it’s not stolen time, either; it’s more like living out of time. Had the Léogâne fault, having rested quietly for many centuries, slipped eight months earlier, we wouldn’t have been matched with a child yet, and we would have had to start the process over. Had it never slipped, we would have waited years to get our daughter; perhaps her mother would have changed her mind and taken her back. Everything about family life seems so intimate, a sequence of tiny moments in time, and to have that feeling mapped upon a scale of geological events puts one’s view of the universe a bit out of kilter.

But this is a tired irony and smacks of guilt that I don’t actually feel, and doesn’t lead to insight greater than that in Samuel Johnson’s timeless remarks on the works of Shakespeare: that they capture

the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.

The truth is, I don’t want to associate the earthquake with Rose. And in some ways her arrival seems divorced from the earthquake or even from Haiti. She is our child now, not a refugee or a victim, not an orphan any longer. The small everyday responsibilities of being a parent—changing diapers, wiping a runny nose, reminding her to draw only on the paper, feeling pride in her accomplishments (she is incredibly smart, and that’s not just coming from a proud dad) and sometimes feeling overwhelmed by how much energy a small child takes—this is the stuff that’s real, and next to it the cosmic coincidence of her getting here seems like an grim abstraction.

So on the morning of January 12th, I’ll get her up, and make her a waffle, and she’ll tell me her hands are sticky (taking joy in saying this relatively new word: Stee-key!) and ask for a napkin (for she is a very fastidious little girl) and say “Tank You!” when I give her one (a very polite little girl, too), and instead of thinking, That high chair would be empty were it not for the earthquake, I’ll try to think of what more we can do to help Haiti. I’m sure that’s what Rose would do.